Facebook Live: Brian Williams, MD

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, MedPage Today interviewed Brian Williams, MD, associate professor of trauma and acute care surgery at the University of Chicago, about the impact Floyd’s death had on him personally and on his colleagues, during a Facebook Live event on June 19, 2020 — Juneteenth.

Williams has his own story too. His life changed dramatically after treating several of the police officers who were shot by a Black sniper in Dallas on July 7, 2016. (Listen to that story here on our “Anamnesis” podcast.) He went on TV to condemn the shooting but also called attention to the deaths of two Black men in the days preceding the police shootings — that of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling — and urged the country to come together to end all types of racial violence.

Following is a transcript of the full interview:

MedPage Today: Hello and welcome to MedPage Today‘s live interview with Dr. Brian Williams. Dr. Williams is associate professor of trauma and acute care surgery at the University of Chicago. Hello, Dr. Williams.

Dr. Williams: Good afternoon, Shannon. Hope you’re staying safe.

MedPage Today: Thank you. Dr. Williams is also the host of the podcast “Race, Violence & Medicine,” and that is what we’re here to talk about today. I am Shannon Firth. I am the Washington correspondent for MedPage Today. How did you feel when you saw that video?

Dr. Williams: There was a visceral response that was literally at the molecular level within my body. I was sickened by the video. I was angry. I was saddened. I felt hopeless. It was like, “What progress have we made that we’ve come to this where we watch a video for nearly ten minutes of someone getting murdered in the streets?”

It was difficult to take and there’s such a compilation of emotions that I don’t know what the one word is to describe all that. But if there’s a word for being super-angry, super-sad, confused, and hopeless, please tell me what that word is because I felt all of those emotions. That was just the first step.

Then when the protests started occurring and I was also watching the protests escalate in Minnesota, and then the police precinct set on fire, and the police evacuating, that’s when I got really nervous. I was extremely concerned about what those protests could escalate to because it was reminiscent to me of what happened in Dallas four years prior and I didn’t want to see any more police officers get killed. I didn’t want to see anybody get killed, but I had this fear that that’s where that was going, that’s the direction that was heading.

MedPage Today: This isn’t the first video that you’ve seen like that. How do you face that every day when either you encounter racism yourself or you see it, you see police brutality or you see something else? How do you deal with that?

Dr. Williams: In the past, I’ve had an incredible ability to compartmentalize a lot of things, particularly with being a trauma surgeon and the amount of gun violence and deaths people in my profession see. That starts to weigh on me. You add on the additional day-to-day pressures or issues you deal with for being black, or a person of color, and a professional, that’s added weight.

Then you see another video of a black man or woman getting killed… what’s that one? Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Many people see them as individual events, they’re disconnected. But I see — and I think many people of color see — that these are all part of a larger narrative. They’re not individual stories. They’re part of the same story.

I think back to Rodney King in 1991. When that video came out, I really thought that that was going to be a turning point because now there’s video and people can see what we know what’s happening in these communities. But nothing changed in the intervening decades. It’s still happening now, so dealing with that added knowledge and pressure continuously wears you down.

Then when it happens, you don’t get to say, “I’m taking tomorrow off. I’m going to go take tomorrow off from work. I’m not going to come in this week. I’m not going to come in for a few days.” You have to go right back to work and you’re working in an area where the majority do not have those experiences. The majority do not have that knowledge.

They may be empathetic. They really, no matter what, just do not truly understand the full ramification of what is happening, yet we have to go to work and put on a smiley face or go about our day-to-day. Which that’s part of the job, I get it, but let’s have some understanding in like, “This is a big deal because of racism.” It crosses so many parts of our society that the day-to-day impacts on people of color cannot be ignored and I think we’re seeing that now. Right? We’re seeing people wake up. The broad range of voices that are speaking out about this, the ages, the races, the ethnicities, the genders, it’s around the world.

This time it actually feels different that, “Okay. You all been saying this for a while, but I didn’t really get it until now. Now I get it, so where do we go from this point forward?” I’m hopeful that this is a time we can actually latch onto and look back and say, “You know, we need to make some good come out of George Floyd’s death. It cannot be in vain for him and for all of the others before.”

MedPage Today: Why do you think George Floyd’s death has set off this stream of protests around the world? Why now? We’ve seen a lot of videos that have been horrendous. What is different about this moment? What’s different about the reaction this time?

Dr. Williams: This moment and the reaction certainly feels different. There is an imagery. There is an international response that makes this stand out from prior events, at least from my perspective.

I think what makes the difference is 1) the graphicness of this video and the fact that we’ve had nearly 10 minutes of the officer sitting on Mr. Floyd and hearing him say, “I can’t breathe,” over and over. Right? In the past, we’ve had short little clips, seconds, maybe a minute, couple of minutes. This is nearly 10 minutes, so it’s hard to look at that and say, “Yeah, that was an accident.”

Or, “The officer had to make a decision at the last second and feared for their life.” All those other reasons that have been used to dismiss the deaths of other black men and women, they can’t apply here. There is just no way you can actually inject that sort of explanation into this particular event. That, I think, is huge for why this time feels different.

Then it’s just you can’t ignore what’s been going on in our country for the past 3 years like the political climate, the rhetoric, and the toxic polarization that is occurring. That has changed the narrative.

I work with an organization, the One America Movement, that talks about how that is detrimental to our society. Just addressing toxic polarization, which has been amplified in the past three years, I think that’s contributed to the reaction seeing it’s not just people of color that are making the argument.

You have people on the left and the right that have condemned that act. You have civilians and law enforcement that have condemned that act. We have that sort of coalition of voices that are saying, “This is wrong. We need to do something,” then that could be the catalyst for change.

MedPage Today: How does the pandemic play into the protests and the situation right now? Seeing the police brutality, coupled with the inequities that we’re seeing in COVID-19, how does that exacerbate the situation?

Dr. Williams: The common thread there is that the same communities that are dying from COVID at disproportionate rates are the same communities that are suffering disproportionate rates of police brutality. They are the same communities that are suffering from increased levels of gun violence and these are communities that are typically racially-segregated communities that are a result of intentional policies that go back generations — hundreds of years — that are meant to exclude blacks and people of color from mainstream society.

It is no surprise that when COVID comes through, this pandemic, this crisis that is killing people, of course we’re going to see poor people and people of color suffer the greatest effects of that because there’s these gaps in our healthcare system — and in our society overall — that put them at the greatest risk when this happens.

We saw it with Katrina. We saw it with the H1N1 flu. We see it with gun violence. You see it with infectious diseases. You see it with natural disasters. You see it with gun violence. You see it with police brutality. It’s the same communities that suffer. We can go on and on by education, income inequality, and infrastructure.

The common thread is we have our communities of color that are isolated and that are suffering from a variety of interrelated issues that put them at risk for a number of things that shorten their lives. COVID has pulled the curtain back on all of that so we can see it for all of its ugliness now once again.

We can’t let this happen again. Let’s use this as a learning opportunity and collectively come together and end all this so that everyone can live safe, healthy, and happy within their own communities.

MedPage Today: What might your white physician colleagues not realize? What is it like for you?

Dr. Williams: I think my colleagues may not realize the intentional things I do outside the hospital when I’m not wearing my white coat and the things I’m cognizant of when I am in the hospital in my white coat.

I recognize that when I’m wearing a white coat, that immediately projects a certain degree… like if I’m wearing a white coat, you know to give me some respect because of the white coat and I’m a doctor. Without the white coat, if you don’t know me, you may not know to give me that sort of respect. Right?

I don’t mean that in a means of there’s a superior-inferior relation. It’s like, “Look, this is just respecting another person as a human being.” But when I’m outside of the hospital, I’m always carrying my hospital badge on me just in case something happens. I can say, “Look, I work at this university. I’m a doctor.” Will it make a difference? I don’t know, but it makes me feel better. It’s like taking vitamins every day.

I don’t walk in my neighborhood by myself. When I walk in my neighborhood, I’m walking my dog because I feel that having a dog with me I’m less threatening with a dog than I am by myself. I just don’t take any chances like that.

In the hospital, I try to compose myself all the time. I do not lose my temper. I boil internally, but I cannot lose my temper at work. I think my white colleagues could do that over and over again, and it will be dismissed as passion or something. If I do it, I’m the angry black man and that can have repercussions about my profession, so I don’t do that.

I’m always thinking about, “Okay, what is the perception of me?” Because I know that before I even open my mouth, there are judgments being made because I’m black and because I’m male. In some situations, that can have lethal consequences. In others, it can have professional consequences.

I don’t think that I’m different than many… in fact, I know I’m not different than a lot of my colleagues that are in the same situation because we talk about this amongst ourselves, but it’s always happened in an open, safe environment with our white colleagues.

But I will say that that is actually starting to happen now where I work because that takes leadership. It takes leadership that’s intentional and willing to make it happen. Because in the absence of that, this will not happen and we’ll not have this sort of sustainable change. But where I am now, leadership has been very intentional about like, “Okay, we’re going to have this discussion. We’re going to make some changes and it’s going to be… everybody has to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” I’m like, “That’s good for me because I’ve been like that for a long time.”

MedPage Today: What do you think should be one thing people take away from this experience, the obvious inequities that we’re seeing with COVID? What should we learn from this?

Dr. Williams: One thing we should learn from this is that this is showing us that these inequities have always existed in the margins and a large part of society has been immune to it because they don’t see it on the day-to-day. It is not in their face, doesn’t really impact them directly, but there are indirect effects.

We see that with COVID because COVID doesn’t care where you live, what your gender is, what’s your race, ethnicity, or income status. It can infect you, but we see that those that are suffering from the deaths most are the marginalized populations in our country.

What we should take from this is that we all have a role in making this a better society and we have to step outside of the limitations that we place on ourselves about what that role is. Like, “Yes, I’m a doctor, but there’s more that I can do besides treat gunshot victims and take care of people in an intensive care unit. I can do things like Facebook Live and talk about systemic racism because I see it in my profession, I see it in my life, and so I feel I can make a difference.”

That could be any of you. You have to remove the limitations you place upon yourselves about what you can do and who you are. Once you free your mind, then there is no limit to the sort of impact that you can have on society. Just unshackle your mind, unshackle yourselves, and just get out there and do you.